America Needs its Ass Beat

When I was growing up, if a man went too far, that man got his ass beat down. Perhaps it was by someone he stepped to in the wrong way, or had simply run his mouth off to beyond the point of tolerable stupidity. Perhaps it was his own dad, or a relative, who’d had enough and took a belt or paddle to his backside. No matter the medium or method, if the man had any smarts at all, he learnedsomething post-haste.

Nine out of ten, that man was better for the experience. There will always be anomalies in the human condition: the occasional man that could not cope with having physical violence forced upon him who then might have become a socio- or psychopath. Such things are inevitable in a universe such as ours, one that often decides our reality with or without our consent.

The notions of safety are a drug to our society. Might as well be Huxley’s Soma in endocrine form. Some people call it the feminization of culture. Others go much more vulgar and call it pussification. I couldn’t care less about such names or arguments. Call it what you will, the problem continues to exist that Modernity cannot seem to any longer comprehend as a simple, universal equation—some might call it ‘Science’—and that equation is that humanity self-destructs in the face of convenience, safety, and comfort. To put a finer point on it, civilization, in whatever form, crumbles once man has created the façade that consequences no longer matter, and that we’re intelligent enough to ‘educate’ or discuss our way out of our own reality as a species.

Despite the never-ending, nagging narrative, the issue is not/won’t be furthered by Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton. They are both symptomatic. And the macro is utterly simpatico with the micro. The issue is, like those before us, we cannot as a collective species cease to congratulate ourselves once we have achieved a certain level of comfort as a civilization. It’s old-fashioned pride; Hubris, as the Greeks called it, followed always by Nemesis. You can argue it. But walls don’t answer. Bulkheads of reality merely maintain their presence. There is no getting around them. Only standing in front of them and screaming pointlessly about how reality should bend to the ‘intelligent’ species called Man.

I check news from all areas. In the two areas of scientism and technology, I find our Hubris to be most prominent. Darwinism does not guarantee that an intelligent, dominant species will endure. Even to the point of ‘evolving,’ as it were, into something else, something technology-based, augmented or enhanced, makes no ironclad agreement with a species to continue to exist. In no small part is that species’ ability to police itself related to its own survival.

It’s not terribly different if one looks to God as the Author of Reality. As true as it is that God wishes for man to depend on Him, to look to Him, it was the depth of purpose that the Greeks possessed in terms of bettering themselves, in the day of Christ, that served as a reason that the Christian God became a Christian God in the first place, by allowing the Gentile into the fold.

In either the darwinist or religious case, the bottom line remains clear: a sentient species such as humanity has a responsibility to police itself in order to survive. While it is admirable that Modernity wishes that no one’s feeling are ever, ever hurt, it is not responsible. Not in any way. From a Darwinist perspective, there is never growth, never any form of evolution, without catalyst. Hurt feelings, crushed egos, and the resulting introspection that can manifest from such frictions, trigger the personal evolution of a human being. Safe spaces do no such thing. That’s a horribly misguided idea that does nothing but stagnate growth. What happens if one takes a form of life, such as a bacteria, or a cell, and places that life into a ‘safe space’—something where no information is received by that life? No external air, no germs, no contaminants at all?

Nothing happens to it. It is preserved. It is not evolving. Not growing. It is stagnant.

Someone go open the lid on that Petri dish and let that life grow.

Fortunately, I am not a politician. Not someone in the public eye. Because that allows me to say that America needs it ass beat. Cue the outrage were I a public figure. Hand-wringing! Accusations of being a traitor to America! Someone on Twitter crushing my heart by tweeting, “Delete your account!” Oh, the agony of it all.

But since I’m not, I’ll repeat it yet again: America needs its ass beat. For our own damn good. To remind us that reality gives no quarter to our ‘intelligence’, unless we as a species are willing to do something, take some responsibility beyond the zeitgeist, beyond the Hive Mind, beyond the parroted doublespeake, to policeourselves.

We’re cruisin’ for such a beatin’. Call me what you will, it makes no difference to me, but if no change occurs in our culture before we cross that line of tolerable stupidity, I’m not going to lament consequences, if said consequences wake up a country in a deep, troubled sleep of apathy.